


Five things Kili Didn’t Know About the Elves of Mirkwood

by gnimaerd



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:08:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimaerd/pseuds/gnimaerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> Five (…well, technically 5.75) things Kili didn’t know about Mirkwood elves, as Tauriel cares for him in Laketown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five things Kili Didn’t Know About the Elves of Mirkwood

 

**1\. The Elves of Mirkwood smell.**  
  
What Kili had at first simply taken as the general scent of the dungeons in Thranduil’s kingdom turns out to be something that lingers about all the elves of that forest. It is not unpleasant, exactly – but a strong odor clings to Tauriel’s hair and skin and it is, at first, off-putting.

She always smells slightly of damp earth, or rain, or perhaps tree sap and rotting bark. It’s a little sweet, a little earthen, and it marks her out as utterly unlike anyone he has ever encountered before. Dwarves also smell, of course, but of entirely normal things like sweat and ale. Who goes around smelling like a forest, for heaven’s sake?

When she sits on the edge of the bed in Bard’s house, and leans over him to check his wound, he inhales the smell of Mirkwood and coughs, wakening slightly.

“Tauriel?”

“Hush,” a cool hand comes to his face, steadying him, “the human children are asleep. Drink this.”

The lip of a bowl is being placed against his mouth. He swallows blindly, but something burns his tongue and he chokes, spitting. “Ugh – what are you feeding me?”

“You must swallow it,” she insists, “please, it will keep the wound in your leg from infection.”

“Well, since you ask so nicely…” he mutters, and has time to see her dry smile before closing his eyes and swallowing again, doing his best to keep the acrid stuff down.

She offers him milk, after, to take the taste away, cradling the back of his head with one hand to help him stay upright, for his head is swimming with the effort.

“There,” she tells him, softly. “Now rest.”

He nods, feeling her hand on his brow again and sleep coming down like a fog – only the smell of Mirkwood following him down into blackness…

2.  **The elves of Mirkwood never leave Mirkwood.**

This Kili supposes he sort of understood but it is very strange to encounter a being some five centuries his senior who has never been more than a mile from her home before. Tauriel is a truly bizarre mixture of terrifyingly intelligent and utterly uneducated about the world beyond Mirkwood.

What also becomes clear is that she is fascinated by anything that isn’t elfin.

Of course, this is to his great advantage – since Kili is of a decidedly non-elfin sort himself and this, apparently, makes him a source of great interest for the warrior she-elf.

Once he is well enough to be awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, she spends a great deal of time sat by his bed asking him questions about Dwarfish customs and cultures and defensive strategies.

The reasonable explanation for her choosing him to pester instead of any of the other Dwarves left in Laketown is, of course, that Kili simply cannot get away from her. But Kili likes to think that it may also be because she has grown fond of him during their scant acquaintance – and if she isn’t yet, certainly this presents an opportunity to coax her into becoming so.

Either way, he is pleased to indulge her, enjoying her attentiveness. His attempts to charm her are only occasionally foiled by Bofur interjecting to remind him of _that time you and Fili let three trolls make off with half the ponies and got the lot of us nearly eaten_ ; or Oin speculating on the mating habits of stone giants; or Fili pointing out that Kili has a much less impressive beard than a dwarf his age ought.

Still Tauriel stays by Kili’s bedside. She wants to know how Kili’s bow was made and keenly examines his arrows once he grants her permission (not that, under her hopeful gaze, he has much choice). She asks about the Dwarfish inscription on his sword and then wants to know about the Dwarfish alphabet – how many letters are there and what do they sound like and how did it evolve and is there more than one Dwarfish language and if so which does Kili speak? She feeds him broth, and asks him questions, and Kili has never once been spoon fed by a pretty elf before and is enjoying it entirely too much to let her know that he really has no idea how to answer half her questions. He makes a lot of things up. He’s fairly sure she knows he’s making things up – but at least he makes her laugh.

A day or so later she climbs into the rafters of Bard’s house, on the vague pretence of helping to repair the roof after the Orc attack, but mostly, Kili realises, she is trying to understand the architecture of the town. She has seen Lake Town before but never crossed into it and she is, for reasons best known to herself, fascinated by how their chimneys work.

Elves do not have chimneys, apparently. Or at least not stone ones with square hearths.

She is fascinated by the buildings in general, so unlike the entirely wooden, organic, growing structures of Mirkwood – the rectangular little rooms, the windows, the slate roofs.

Kili, perhaps somewhat unwisely, gets out of bed to follow her onto the roof, and sits feeling only a little feverish, as he watches her running her fingertips over the slate tiles. Tauriel attempts to pull up one that has come loose, as if to work out how they have been slotted together. She’s unfamiliar with the material – she asks Kili whether such rock comes out of the ground in this state, or has it been carved?

Kili finds himself attempt to explain the exact attributes of slate to her, in what somehow manages to be both absolutely the strangest and most dull conversation he has had in some time.

Then he faints, and Tauriel has to carry him down off the roof and forbid him from getting out of bed again for the foreseeable future.

But she sits by his bed still, and so he doesn’t mind at all

**3\. The Elves of Mirkwood like children.**

This Kili hadn’t quite expected. But Tauriel takes an immediate interest in Bard’s children, and, in their father’s absence – whilst Bard remains locked in the town gaol – seems to take on de-facto guardianship.

“They are very young,” she tells Kili, when he asks her, as if it should be obvious that of course these children require her oversight, guidance, and tutoring in the quickest method by which to disembowel an orc with a table knife. “When I was sixteen I was barely considered sentient – how these younglings are meant to fend for themselves at such an age I have no idea.”

Elves of any sort do not have children very often – Kili supposes that amongst an immortal race there is hardly much cause for furthering the population – and in Mirkwood there have apparently not been any born in several hundred years. Tauriel has not had contact with the young of any other people at all, and seems interested in how the children of Men differ from those of Elves in their development.

Kili catches her measuring the hands of the youngest of Bard’s daughters, Tilda, in comparison to the elder one – Sigrid.

“At what rate do you grow?” She enquires, “by years or by decades?”

Neither girl seems quite able to answer that.

“How old are you?” Tilda demands, instead.

“Tilda!” Her elder sister nudges her.

“I am six hundred years old, more or less,” Tauriel shrugs, “why?”

“Six hundred?!” Tilda looks scandalised and delighted. “Truly? How?”

“Quite easily – I was born, and since then I have lived six centuries,” Tauriel looks amused. “That is not so very long for an elf, you know. My lord Thranduil, king of Mirkwood, is now near enough 6000 years himself.”

Tilda looks suitably impressed.

Six hundred years old, Kili thinks – he wonders at all the things she must have seen and done in such a length of time, if only within Mirkwood. How might a six hundred year old elf ever consider a mere seventy seven year old dwarf an equal? For that matter, how much longer than he will she live? By the time she is as old as Thranduil is now, she will have quite forgotten him, he is sure… not that that fact ought much to matter to him.

**4\. The Elves of Mirkwood enjoy stories.**

To comfort Bard’s children in the wake of the invasion of their home by a small army of nightmarish creatures and the protracted absence of their father, Tauriel tells them stories – and Kili begins to wish that Ori had remained with them, so that he could write a few of them down.

They are not a bit like Dwarfish tales, but there is a curious intrigue to all of them, nonetheless. Or perhaps it’s simply the way that Tauriel tells them, her voice lilting and soft, as if she were reciting poetry (later, she tells him that in her language, almost all such stories rhyme).

By the time she has recited to the children the entirety of the tragic story of a beautiful ancient elf maiden named Luthien and her mortal lover, Beren, even Bofur has settled at her feet to listen to her talk. It is night time in Laketown and Tauriel sits at the table in the little house’s main room, the light of a candle threading her copper-coloured hair with gold and casting spider-leg shadows from her eyelashes down her feline features. When she smiles, amongst the sadness of the story, it becomes sweetness itself, and when she uses her lean, pale hands to outline the edge of a mountain or the boundaries of a dungeon, it’s as if the spell of the words casts these things into being under her fingertips.

(“I did not know elves could tell such stories,” Fili murmurs to Kili. “Do ou think they are all so gifted, or is it only this one?”

“Perhaps some of both,” Kili replies, and Fili nods, sagely – and then Tilda turns an indignant look at the two of them and puts a finger to her lips, so they do not speak again until Tauriel has finished her tale).

“Does it happen often?” Kili asks the elf, some hours later, when the others are all asleep and she is sat by his bed again, changing the dressing on his wound.

“What?” She enquires, not glancing up from her work.

“Elves who – fall in love with mortal men,” he presses, trying not to flinch as she tugs at the cloth about his thigh, “does it happen often?”

She stills a moment, but will not meet his gaze. “No.”

“Was it only Luthien and Beren, then?”

“No,” she exhales, softly, casts him a quick glance then away again, “there was the union of Tuor and Idril, whose son was Earendil, who was the father of Elrond Half-Elven…”

“Elrond – of Rivendell? He is half mortal?” Kili feels his eyebrows shoot up.

“He is one of the half-elven – those amongst the elves who carry the blood of men,” Tauriel corrects, “he is not mortal.”

Kili suspects that it is too late at night for him to be processing any of this. “So the children of elves and men… they may be immortal?”

“Or they may not be. Elrond’s brother was not.”

Kili nods, slowly. “Are there… any other unions, that you know of? Between – elves and – not elves?”

“Not elves?”

“Yes, like…” he won’t say dwarves. It’d be entirely unsubtle of him to say dwarves. Wouldn’t it?

Tauriel only smiles, enigmatic, and pulls the blankets back up over his leg.

The following day, Kili sees an opportunity to impress her.

From his bed, he cocks an eye at her. Some feet away at the table, she is mixing some noxious smelling potion or other to keep any infection in his skin at bay. “Have you ever heard a Dwarfish story?”

She glances up, her expression quizzical. “Dwarves have stories?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Kili feigns exasperated offence, “we may be short and ugly, my lady, but we are not entirely uncultured.”

“I’m sorry,” Tauriel inclines her head, “I should not have assumed.”

“Yes,” Kili nods, “now – I should tell you about – the stone giants, in the Misty Mountains. I was nearly killed by one. I mean – we all were. ”

Tauriel frowns. “Truly?”

“Yes – there were – Fili, how many giants were there?”

Fili is, for reasons best known to himself, trying to sleep under the table. “I don’t know,” he replies, without opening his eyes. “I was too busy trying not to be crushed to stop and count them.”

“There were three,” Oin supplies, over the mug of tea he’s drinking, “I believe two were fighting over the hand of a third.”

“You mean to say those things have mating rituals?” Kili raises his eyebrows.

“And why not?” Balin asks, “they must reproduce somehow, young lad.”

Kili pulls a face that makes Tauriel laugh, abruptly: a warm, gentle sound that makes Kili want to propose, now, immediately, and hang what uncle Thorin has to say when he returns to find one of his heirs engaged to a she-elf – but he doesn’t, because his leg hurts and he suspects that being in excruciating pain when he kneels would not make for an especially romantic proposal.

He settles for trying not to stare too intently at Tauriel’s face.

“But what were the stone giants like?” Tauriel asks, taking his attention as invitation – she has come to sit on the edge of his bed, her interest piqued. “How large were they?”

Kili extends his arms, attempting to demonstrate, “so big, you couldn’t tell them from the mountains – we were stood on one of them, without even realising until the great thing moved and then – ”

“And then we all nearly died a terrible, horrible death,” Fili interjects, still beneath the table. “Don’t romanticize it.”

“I wasn’t romanticizing anything,” Kili retorts, “I was explaining to the nice elf lady all about our adventures.”

“He’s trying to impress you,” Fili directs this at Tauriel, “don’t let him. He’s young and unsophisticated.”

“And he smells funny,” Bofur adds, cheerfully, as he enters from outside with a stack of firewood. “What are we talking about?”

“Why Tauriel should be unimpressed by Kili.”

“Oh, god no you don’t want to be impressed by him,” Bofur shakes his head, “he’s not even got a beard! And at his age – there’s something wrong with him, I tell you.”

“I have no reason to _try_  to impress the elf lady,” Kili declares, “I’m sure she’s perfectly impressed by me already.”

He flashes Tauriel his brightest smile, earning himself an entertained look in return.  Bofur makes an exceptionally rude sound in the back of his throat, somewhat ruining the moment.

“Tell me – after you escaped the stone giants,” Tauriel leans closer, instantaneously restoring the moment and elevating it to one that Kili would quite like never to end (would it be improved by a proposal? He decides he’ll wait and see), “what else befell you on your journey to Mirkwood?”

“Well…” Kili wonders which of their adventures would make him seem the most heroic, “there was – the time – I stood between a Hobbit and an entire Orc pack – ”

“Yeah, not before that Hobbit stood between said Orc pack and Thorin,” Bofur says, “we were dangling off a cliff for most of that, as I recall.”

“You could regale the lady with the story of how you and Fili allowed trolls invade our camp,”Oin remarks, dryly, “and we all ended up nearly roasted alive and eaten.”

“We never got that close to being eaten,” Kili folds his arms.

“We came close enough for my whiskers to get singed,” Bofur retorts.

Tauriel is looking between the dwarves with an expression that speaks of deep scepticism.

“It was a minor oversight,” Kili assures her, “could have happened to anyone. I mean who expects trolls that far north?”

Tauriel delicately arches an eyebrow. “Who indeed?”

“Tell her about the goblin kingdom,” Fili suggests, still beneath the table. “That’s not a bad one.”

“The goblin kingdom.” Tauriel repeats, blankly.

“Yes – have you ever seen the goblin king?” Kili props himself up on his elbows, “you’ve never laid eyes on anything so ugly in your entire life, a face that could sink ships – ”

“Turn you to stone,” Fili adds.

“Turn half of Lake Town to stone,” Kili agrees, “nose like a pig, mouth full of these broken – yellow – gummy fangs all – oozing and – and he had this chin like a – a – “

“Ballsack,” Bofur supplies, entirely without tact (Fili snorts, rolling onto his stomach.)

Tauriel quirks her head. “And how did you survive such an encounter?”

“With great skill,” Kili declares.

“And by running very, very fast,” Bofur adds.

“But how did you come to such a place?” Tauriel is frowning, “where were you traveling from?”

“Ahh,” Kili considers, then sits back, “well, alright – I’ll start from the – beginning, ish.”

One corner of Tauriel’s mouth quirks, and she positions herself more comfortably on the bed. “Go on then, little one.”

“I will,” Kili tells her, “if – you do not make me swallow any of that.”

He indicates the noxious mixture Tauriel still holds, in a little bowl brought from the table.

Tauriel gives him a calculating look. “A spoonful,” she says,

Kili eyes the content of the bowl dubiously. “How will it taste?”

“Terrible,” Tauriel informs him, “but it will keep you from dying an agonising death from blood poisoning.”

Kili sighs, “alright. Alright – just a spoonful, mind. And just for you.”

Tauriel smiles, dryly, and offers him the spoon.

**5\. The Elves of Mirkwood like to be clean**

It makes sense – odd Mirkwood smell aside – that elves should be a fastidious sort of race in general. Certainly those in Rivendell looked as if they must scrub themselves down with soap and water three times a day and spend twice that time combing their hair. And even though in Mirkwood, certainly a soldier of Tauriel’s sort seemed a little rougher and sharper and more willing to go wading through pools of Orc guts, the very fact that they were so willing and yet remained, generally speaking, unsullied by their skirmishes, would rather suggest a propensity toward cleanliness.

And it is not as if Dwarves live in pig sties or are anywhere near as mucky a people as unkind rumour might make out – but for a surety, sweat and grime on a Dwarf is more of a mark of pride than it might be considered on an elf.

But Kili isn’t sure if Tauriel is truly obsessive, or simply a typical example of her people.

In the mornings, Kili – awoken by a dull throbbing in his leg – watches Tauriel rise from where she has been asleep on the table (minor factoid 5.5 – the elves of Mirkwood can sleep almost anywhere), and goes about her morning routine.

Before sleep, she braids her hair and pins it all to the top of her head, which saves her from rolling on it and tugging it when she sleeps – in fairness, Kili has seen dwarves with lengthy beards doing the something similar, pinning their bears to their chins – an accidentally knelt-on beard can be a rude awakening, after all.

For the moment, however, he cannot help but be a little admiring of the deftness with which Tauriel unfurls copper-coloured coils of hair, producing a comb to begin teasing out fine strands, oiling the tips and twisting the roots to pull the front from her face, keeping it out of her eyes. After that she removes her tunic and shirt, exposing long, sinewey arms, leanly muscled, and leaving her in a thin shift (Kili tries not to look at that part), so that she can scrub her arms, neck and face, her finger nails and ears.

She does this in the bucket of water she brought from the lake the night before and boiled on the stove, though it must be freezing now, he supposes she doesn’t mind the cold. The scrubbing turns her skin a rosy pink and where it splashes her shift it clings to her and Kili swallows, hard. She is not like a Dwarf maiden, who would be all curves under such a garment – but there is something exotically attractive to the lean, lengthy-ness of Tauriel, nonetheless.

And after she has washed she chews bark. When Kili caught her doing this on her first morning in Laketown, she told him that it kept her teeth clean – did not dwarves have any similar remedy?

Perhaps elvish teeth are delicate things in need of scrubbing, but dwarves have no such issue, Kili had assured her – and Tauriel had laughed, and spat the chewed bark into a mug and rinsed her mouth with water.

“It is a long time to live on this earth if you are immortal but toothless,” was all she had said.

Now, as she rinses her mouth, she catches him watching, and smiles. “Do you wish a cup of tea, master dwarf?”

He shakes his head. “My leg hurts.”

She frowns, pulling on her shirt as she crosses the kitchen to his bed.

But it is not some new infection or other malady – only the muscle seizing up, from being made immobile so long, she tells him. A week of inactivity, now the wound has closed, has not been good for it.

“You’d be best to swim,” she tells him, “in the lake – just a little. It would relax the muscle without putting any weight on it.”

“And how do you suggest I get up out of this bed and down to the lakeside when I cannot walk unaided?”

At that, Tauriel only quirks an eyebrow, her gaze abruptly mischievous.

Kili is not sure that he will ever quite recover from being carried on the back of a she-elf through a town of gawking observers down to where the lake runs clear and free of the town’s pollutants.

“You know I could think of more dignified methods of transport for a prince,” he tells Tauriel, giving one of her ears a gentle tug.

Tauriel responds by jerking him further up her back with a snort. “Would you prefer I carried you over my head and declared the coming of Thorin Oakenshield’s youngest heir?”

Kili has to admit to not minding overmuch – he likes being able to touch her ears.

The lake is, however, utterly freezing in the thin morning air, and the water bites at him as he dips his toes in. “Are you certain this will not simply freeze my leg off?”

“Fairly,” Tauriel replies, breezily.

Kili moans and Tauriel’s mouth curls into an expression of warm amusement. “And here you were only yesterday boasting to me of the great bravery of your kind, little one.”

Kili narrows his eyes at her, but sighs and tip-toes further into the water. She has to follow him, because he cannot really put weight on the leg and he must lean on her arm, but she moves as if she doesn’t feel the cold at all – and really, it’s alright for her – as it creeps past his thighs it’s barely up to her knees.

Once they get past a certain point, however, he finds he must lift off the ground a swim a little even though he shivers – and immediately the ache in his leg eases.

Tauriel, to his surprise, joins him – tossing her tunic back onto the shore before plunging headfirst into the water, swimming past him in a slick glass blur of flowing limbs and hair beneath the surface. Kili follows, at a somewhat more sedate pace, though Tauriel surfaces a moment later and smiles at him, reaching back to pull him closer.

“Does the cold bother you so much now?”

“No,” Kili admits, because the relief to his leg is far better than he’d hoped, and because her hands are warm on his waist beneath the water, “the lake is doing me some good, I think.”

“You could do with a wash anyway,” Tauriel tells him, and Kili snorts and splashes at her, which makes her smile and duck beneath the surface again.

They swim one way and then the other along the shore, until Kili’s lips start to turn blue and Tauriel insists he gets out – though at first he refuses and forces her to chase him through the water and drag him out by his good leg. He kicks and splutters his outrage but then sprawls on the lakeshore with a yelp and Tauriel gasps.

“Kili?” Darting to his side to grasp his shoulder, she seems momentarily afraid that she has truly hurt him. When he rolls onto his back laughing at having, if only briefly, fooled her, she smacks him on the temple.

“Had you for a moment!”

“You’re a terrible prince,” she retorts, kneeling as he sits up, “no honour at all.”

Her shirt is clinging to her to the point where she might hardly be wearing anything at all – Kili laughs in his attempt to cover how distracting she is, how beguiling her disgruntled scowl is when suddenly level with his face.

“My leg does feel better though,” he tells her, “thank you.”

If she forgives him she shows it by helping him to his feet and letting him lean on her arm instead of carrying him back through the town. They must make a sight, a sopping wet dwarf prince and his warrior she-elf companion… back in Bard’s house, Tauriel draws him a hot bath in a tin tub in front of the stove.

“You really do need a wash,” she points out, critically, “you’ll take longer to recover if you’re not kept clean.”

And when he protests, she pushes him forward and scrubs the back of his neck until he has to threaten to put an ancient dwarfish curse on her if she doesn’t stop.

Bard’s house is empty, thank the Valar. He sits in the bath in his small clothes, because he’s not sure his dignity can take being naked in front of her, and she helps wash his hair, those same deft fingers she uses on her own braids careful and gentle against his scalp.

“You must be carrying half a forest in here,” she scolds, not unkindly, as she gently peels a second mossy tendril from the thatch of matted curls at the back of his head.

“You should get in too,” he tells her, and at her sharp look hastily adds, “the water’s warm – you’re cold from the lake – wouldn’t want you catching cold or – anything.”

“Elves do not catch colds.” (Minor factoid 5.75, Kili thinks).

But she does climb in, in her clothes, sighing softly in relief at the warmth and drawing her legs to her chest, her shirt swimming on the surface around her so that she looks like the centre part of some bizarre, overgrown water flower. He watches her close her eyes and tip her head back, steam touching her skin, damp tendrils of hair clinging to her face – there’s something miraculous about how strange the situation is.

Kili nudges her leg with a toe. “If ever you’d told me I’d one day be sharing a bath with an elf – ”

She laughs, shortly, her gaze merry over the length of the bath. “If ever you’d told me…”

She sits up, slides down the bath to straddle his legs (Kili holds his breath) and leans closer to continue combing out his hair with her fingers. This close he can see pale freckles on her skin, count her eyelashes, and smell that strange, damp forest smell she always carries with her. He can also see down her shirt and swiftly closes his eyes as she works.

“There,” she murmurs a moment or so later, “now you’re perfect.”

He opens his eyes, and she hasn’t moved, and for a moment it’s as if she is watching him as keenly as he is her.

Kili touches his tongue to his lips. “Not so much as you.”

And oh, that’s a terrible line – Fili would laugh at him – but he has said it before he can stop himself and he feels her still, sees the line of tension running down her jaw, and wishes he hadn’t – wishes he could swallow back the words – because now she’ll get out of the bath and avoid his gaze for the rest of the day and…

But she doesn’t.

“Do you mean that?” Her voice is low and unsteady and there is a note in it he has never heard before.

Kili forces himself to meet her eye, and nods, just once, aware of her breath warm on his face, his own coming in a short, shallow gasp.

She leans down, and brushes her mouth to his – her lips are still cold and the touch is so brief and soft that it feels like snow melting. Kili has forgotten even to close his eyes or touch her arms or stroke her hair or do any of what a good romantic dwarf ought to in such situations. His vision blurs, his head swims – he hopes very much that he’s not about to faint in front of her again.

“Tauriel…” he manages, and that’s as far as he gets before he kisses her back, his body rebelling against any attempt to show restraint. She makes a sweet, startled sound in the back of her throat, and then wraps her arms about his shoulders as he pulls her close, one hand on her hip (mostly to keep her off his bad leg), the other going to the back of her head.

Her body is taught against his own. He can feel all the power she wields bound up in every muscle, and in the tremble of her breath against his mouth – she nips at his top lip and he thinks that there can’t be a single thing in all of Middle Earth that feels better at this moment than her teeth and tongue and long, lean body pressed hard to his and her hair between his fingers and her hands cupping his chin - 

Then Bofur comes rattling through the front door singing something obscene about pigs and headgehogs and dogs’ bollocks, and Tauriel leaps up so fast she might actually have hit the ceiling. Kili laughs, to hide the fact that he’s shaking – then lets Tauriel help him out of the bath.

They do not explain themselves to Bofur, who gives the funny looks for the rest of the day.


End file.
